What are movies if not high-falutin’ weather shelters? When it’s too hot outside to even think, giant robots blowing each other up will always be there for you. And when it’s pouring rain and the kids and you are about to kill each other all cooped up inside, Will Smith will make you feel love again.
Weather experts know this, and Hollywood certainly knows this, but a new study about the effect of weather on moviegoing actually has some surprising results. The new report from Weatherbill tells us that even a tiny amount of rain makes people flock to the movies in droves, but oddly, hot weather actually decreases attendance. For example, the #1 film in a given weekend earns 9% less if it's on an unusually warm weekend rather than a cooler weekend (this belies all that common knowledge that July 4 is a guaranteed juggernaut weekend). Through the entire summer, May through August, box office tends to be lower on unusually warm weekends.
Of course, this is all research done in the U.K., which gets a lot less hot than it does in the U.S., and a whole lot more rain. Still, it kind of turns around the way you look at the summer moviegoing season, which the study found was most affected by weather. I always figured people ran to the box office during the summer regardless of weather, but were especially likely to go if it was nasty outside. I definitely saw Bewitched entirely because the theater was air-conditioned. But it looks like we love hot weather even more than we love giant explosions. Maybe the movie theater owners really ought to be the ones out there fighting global warming.
